Methods – Page 5 – Integration and Implementation Insights

Making predictions under uncertainty

August 24, 2022August 25, 2016

By Joseph Guillaume

Prediction under uncertainty is typically seen as a daunting task. It conjures up images of clouded crystal balls and mysterious oracles in shadowy temples. In a modelling context, it might raise concerns about conclusions built on doubtful assumptions about the future, or about the difficulty in making sense of the many sources of uncertainty affecting highly complex models.

However, prediction under uncertainty can be made tractable depending on the type of prediction. Here I describe ways of making predictions under uncertainty for testing which conclusion is correct. Suppose, for example, that you want to predict whether objectives will be met. There are two possible conclusions – Yes and No, so prediction in this case involves testing which of these competing conclusions is plausible.

Tool users old and new: Why we need models

August 24, 2022June 23, 2016

By Suzanne A. Pierce

Ask most 21st century citizens whether they like technology and they will respond with a resounding, “Yes!” Ask them why and you’ll get answers like, “Because it’s cool and technology is fun!” or “Technology systems help us learn and understand things.” Or “Technology helps us communicate with one another, keep up with current events, or share what we are doing.” Look at the day-to-day activities of most people on the planet and you’ll find that they use some form of technology to complete almost every activity that they undertake.

When you think about it, technologies are really just tools. And we humans are tool users of old.

Serious gaming: Helping stakeholders address community problems

August 24, 2022June 9, 2016

By Nagesh Kolagani

Citizens are increasingly coming together to solve problems that affect their communities. Participatory modeling is a method that helps them to share their implicit and explicit knowledge of these problems with each other and to plan and implement mutually acceptable and sustainable solutions.

While using this method, stakeholders need to understand large amounts of information relating to these problems. Various interactive visualization tools are being developed for this purpose. One such tool is ‘serious gaming’ which combines technologies from the video game industry – mystery, appealing graphics, etc., – with a purpose other than pure entertainment, a serious, problem driven, educational purpose.

Playing Around with PARTICIPOLOGY

September 17, 2021June 7, 2016

By Alister Scott

Have you ever wanted a new way to engage with stakeholders that is more engaging, fun and effective? PARTICIPOLOGY is a set of open-access web resources and associated guidance that sets out to achieve these aims. It uses a board game format where players encounter questions and challenges as a dice throw dictates. The board, questions and rules of the game can be designed from scratch or existing templates can be adapted to the specific goals you have in mind. The game was designed to be used in participatory forums about land use options, but the principles can be more widely applied to all kinds of participatory processes.

There are five key findings from developing and using these resources.

Modeling as empowerment

August 24, 2022April 21, 2016

By Laura Schmitt Olabisi

Who can make systems change? The challenges of complexity are intensely felt by those who are trying to make strategic interventions in coupled human-environmental systems in order to fulfill personal, societal, or institutional goals. The activists, leaders, and decision-makers I work with often feel overwhelmed by trying to deal with multiple problems at once, with limited time, resources, and attention. We need tools to help leaders cut through the complexity so that they can identify the most effective strategies to make change.

This is where participatory system dynamics modelers like myself come in.

La modélisation participative, un lieu privilégié pour l’interdisciplinarité? / Participatory modeling: An ideal place for interdisciplinarity?

August 24, 2022April 7, 2016

By Pierre Bommel

An English version of this post is available

La modélisation participative cherche à impliquer un groupe de personnes dans la conception et la révision d’un modèle. L’objectif à terme consiste à mieux caractériser les problèmes actuels et imaginer collectivement comment tenter de les résoudre. Dans le domaine de l’environnement en particulier, il apparaît nécessaire que les acteurs concernés se sentent impliqués dans la démarche de modélisation, afin qu’ils puissent exprimer leurs propres points de vue, mais aussi pour mieux s’engager dans des décisions collectives. De ce fait, pour aborder la gestion intégrée des ressources, il est nécessaire de mettre les acteurs au centre des préoccupations de recherche, à la fois lors de la phase la conception du modèle mais aussi pour l’exploration de ces scénarios.

Can mapping mental models improve research implementation?

August 14, 2023January 27, 2016

By Katrin Prager

We all have different mental models of the environment and the people around us. They help us make sense of what we experience. In a recent project exploring how to improve soil management (PDF 250KB), Michiel Curfs and I used data collected from Spanish farmers and our own experience to develop and compare the mental model of a typical Spanish farmer growing olives with that of a hypothetical scientist. How did their mental models of soil degradation differ? Mainly in terms of understanding the role of ploughing, and the importance of drivers for certain soil management activities. There were only a few areas of overlap: both scientist and farmer were concerned about fire risk and acknowledged weeds. We emphasise the importance of two-way communication, and recommend starting by focusing on areas of overlap and then moving to areas that are different. Without integrating understandings from both mental models, the scientist will carry on making recommendations for reducing soil degradation that the farmer cannot implement or does not find relevant.

Katie Moon and Vanessa Adams used a more elaborate approach to map natural resource managers’ mental models of invasive species management (2MB PDF available from linked page).

The promise of using similar methods across disciplines

August 14, 2023January 13, 2016

By Allison Metz

Interdisciplinarity has the potential to broaden and deepen our understanding and application of methods and tools to address complex challenges. When we embrace interdisciplinarity we broaden what we know about the potential methods for assessing and tackling problems, and we deepen our understanding of specific methods by applying these methods across different contexts. In my pursuit to understand co-creative processes by interconnected stakeholders – i.e., the deep and authentic engagement of stakeholders across governance, science, and community boundaries to identify and optimize the use of evidence for positive outcomes – I have been influenced by methods used outside of my discipline of implementation science and current context of child welfare services. For example, I recently read an article that studied the co-production of knowledge in soils governance (Prager & McKee, 2015) in the United Kingdom and was struck by the usefulness of these ideas for child welfare services in the United States.

The authors use a methodology referred to as “action arenas” to describe and discern the co-production processes that take place between specific stakeholder groups in soils governance.

Modelling is the language of scientific discovery

August 14, 2023December 2, 2015

By Steven Gray

Modeling is the language of scientific discovery and has significant implications for how scientists communicate within and across disciplines. Whether modeling the social interactions of individuals within a community in anthropology, the trade-offs of foraging behaviors in ecology, or the influence of warming ocean temperatures on circulation patterns in oceanography, the ability to represent empirical or theoretical understanding through modeling provides scientists with a semi-standardized language to explain how we think the world works. In fact, modeling is such a basic part of human reasoning and communication that the formal practice of scientific modeling has been recently extended to include non-scientists, especially as a way to understand complex and poorly understood socio-environmental dynamics and to improve collaborative research. Although the field of participatory modeling has grown in recent years, there are still considerable questions about how different software tools common to participatory modeling can be used to facilitate communication and learning among diverse groups, which approaches are more or less suitable (given the nature of a community or environmental issue), and whether these approaches effectively lead to action-oriented outcomes.